hardware

Microsoft has to remain relevant to hardware hackers. While they are necessary – no one can dispute the strength of Windows in the business world – they have, for the past decade, fallen slowly in esteem in the eyes of designers, makers, and artists. That’s why their recent partnership with Makerbot makes perfect sense. Read More

Yes, that headline does say “shoelace startup.” Hickies was a Kickstarter project created by a team of Argentinian founders, including husband and wife team Mariquel Waingarten and Gaston Frydlewski, which met raised $159,167 on the crowdfunding site and allowed the startup to relocated to NYC and enter mass production. Hickies are shoelaces that don’t require untying… Read More

San Francisco-based video monitoring hardware and software startup Dropcam today announced the close of a new $30 million Series C funding round, led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), and with participation by new investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and existing backers Accel Partners and Menlo Ventures. I spoke to Dropcam CEO Greg Duffy about the funding, which, by his… Read More

If innovations in 3D printing, and platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, are making it easier than ever for hardware startups to conceive and prototype new gadgets, then Flextronics, the San Jose-based manufacturer that works with Apple and many others on smartphones and more, is putting its hat in the ring to tap into hardware startups another way. It is launching a new accelerator, Lab… Read More

The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple is probably the best-connected Apple blogger on the planet at the moment, so when he posts an entry called “WWDC Expectations,” the entire community’s ears perk up. The annual Apple developer conference is only a couple of weeks away, and there’s been lots of speculation about what we might see. Dalrymple brings us back to earth… Read More

One interesting element of Google I/O this year were the sensors laid out everywhere around Moscone tracking environmental data throughout the event. Those types of sensors are now all around us, including in our phones and in various smart home devices, and now a new Kickstarter project from ManyLabs wants to help kids get familiar with them very early on. Read More

Amazon offers a range of hardware, including its Kindle e-readers and tablets, but now it’s looking to expand the line with two new smartphones and an audio-only device that streams music, according to the Wall Street Journal. The phones include a high-end one with a glasses-free 3D screen, as well as another about which details were not included in the report, which presumably would be… Read More

Google Glass is still very much a pre-release product, but a new update today edges it closer to a shipping device, thanks to some core functionality additions that you’d expect to see in consumer Google hardware. The “XE5″ update adds inbound notifications from Google+, so you can see direct shares, comments and mentions, as well as comment and +1 those updates. There are… Read More

In all the discussions I’ve had with hardware makers about their products, one thing is becoming clear: in the end, the cheap part is never cheap. Take a look at this post about a Kickstarter project for example. A maker, Michael Ciuffo, had recently funded a very cool QR code clock that used a simple array of LEDs to display the time in QR code. Read More

Dogs, drones, and digital controllers, oh my! This year’s Disrupt conference in New York was full of amazing webs services and software, but Hardware Alley brought out the best in hardware startups and showed the world that hardware is finally serious business. Read More

Apple CEO Tim Cook doesn’t generally talk too specifically about upcoming product plans, but he went out of his way to put an unusually fine point on when to expect new products than he usually does. Cook kicked off today’s Apple earnings call talking about how Apple is looking forward to exciting product news in the fall, and throughout 2014, and then reiterated the exact same… Read More

Designers Dave and Calvin Laituri have joined forces to kickstart Pucs, small, stainless-steel icecube replacements that promise to chill your drink without wetting it down. The Pucs are milled of solid steel and come in a handsome wooden tray that you can place right into the freezer. Read More

Online note-taking company Evernote revealed something very interesting via its CEO Phil Libin, who told IDG News Service that his company wants to design hardware products and eventually make them itself. Libin said Evernote will move soon to start releasing Evernote-branded gadgets, which will be co-designed and manufactured by external OEM partners. Read More

Leap Motion hasn’t even launched its first product yet, and already the company is on a roll. Now, it’s announcing a collaboration with HP, to bring its brand of 3D motion control to that company’s devices, first via bundling the Leap Motion Controller with select HP computers, and then later by hardware integration that embeds Leap tech right into HP gadgets themselves. Read More

Sensors are quickly becoming a category of external hardware gadgets unto themselves, and Slovenia-based CubeSensors is creating a set that essentially monitor your living space to provide you with aggregate data about noise, temperature, humidity, light, air quality and more to provide clues about how your environment might be affecting you and those around you. Read More

Apple’s greatest innovation in recent version of iOS was clearly enabling emoji keyboard support for all iPhone and iPad users, regardless of region. Emojis are fun for everyone, but they could potentially get better thanks to a new Kickstarter project. The TeleSound is an iPhone and Android device accessory that lets users send sound messages, by translating the emojis built into iOS into… Read More

Toronto’s Upverter is a startup that’s poised to effect change that could reshape the landscape of entrepreneurship. That’s not something you can say about most of the businesses we cover on a daily basis, whether or not they have good ideas. But it’s definitely true of Upverter, the company that’s hoping to build a cloud-based hardware engineering platform that… Read More

Rumors from an “extremely reliable source” speaking to 9t05Google have suggested Google will soon start to operate its own physical retail stores starting as soon as the 2013 holiday season in the U.S. Brick-and-mortar shops from an Internet search company? Sounds like a stretch, but the Goog is breaking out of its search box big time, and recent additions to the Nexus line are… Read More

Once upon a time, Apple was a hardware company that also maintained a software and media ecosystem since it helped drive purchases of Macs, iPods and more. But over the years, the software and services side of the business has become increasingly important, and CEO Tim Cook even went so far as to state out right that Apple is “not a hardware company.” Not once, but twice. Read More

In this episode of my Foundation video series, I talk with Jawbone CEO and Founder Hosain Rahman. Hosain and I discuss the entrepreneurial environment at Stanford in the 1990’s, The Jetsons as design inspiration, and how his meeting with Steve Jobs shaped the future of Jawbone’s first product designs. Read More